The McDonald's Equilibrium: Advertising, Empty Calories, and the Endogenous Determination of Dietary Preferences

Trenton Smith ()

University of California at Santa Barbara, Economics Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, UC Santa Barbara

Abstract: A comparison of accepted nutritional advice with actual American dietary practice suggests that many people fail to eat well in spite of well-documented health consequences. Popular culture often labels the worst offenders as lacking in “self-control,” and many blame the aggressive advertising campaigns of the fast-food and snack-food industries for manipulating consumers into poor diets, but these conclusions are not easily reconciled with a neoclassical approach to economic decision theory. This essay considers the consumer’s “diet problem” in light of emerging evidence from a number of behavioral sciences. In particular, it is argued that human evolution in the distant past resulted in an elegant solution to this problem (of search for a suitable diet in an uncertain environment), which any neoclassical economist would recognize. In modern environments, however, the signals that formerly provided information in the consumer’s search problem are subject to manipulation by food-producing firms. Confirmation by molecular biologists that many human responses to these signals are firmly encoded in our genes suggests a need to re-evaluate the welfare economics of the food industry.

Keywords: McDonald's Equilibrium; Advertising; Empty Calories; Dietary Preferences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002-08-16
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/0hx9x4jr.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The McDonald’s Equilibrium. Advertising, empty calories, and the endogenous determination of dietary preferences (2004)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cdl:ucsbec:qt0hx9x4jr

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in University of California at Santa Barbara, Economics Working Paper Series from Department of Economics, UC Santa Barbara Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff ().